Large enterprises are complex environments, made up of thousands of processes focused on the efficient delivery of goods and services. If any of these business processes are insufficient to meet the changing needs of the business, the result can be higher costs, lower customer satisfaction, and missed opportunities to generate incremental revenues and increased profits.
Companies address this challenge through a combination of automated and manual processes. Automated business applications were initially introduced to handle routine processes. Application developers attempt to manage complexity by delivering multiple, separate applications, creating discrete functional islands with limited integration that continue to restrict business agility. The traditional method of hard coding business information into these applications sometimes proves inflexible for handling the full range of complexity and flexibility needed for business solutions. Additionally, the high cost of maintaining and updating such business information hard coded within applications adds to the cost of missed business opportunities when every business change requires an IT development project.
A challenge for dynamic companies is choosing a system designed to handle all aspects of highly complex business process. Software called Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) has been developed in recent years to enable companies to build and maintain complex enterprise-wide process management systems. At a minimum, a BPMS must contain both a structured workflow engine and a business rules engine. In general, the overall control flow of a company's business process is captured in a structured workflow model, while complex decision-making components of the process are captured in formal business rules. Control flow describes the steps by which a business process is regulated at different stages in a process or model.
Programs have been developed in the past to analyze business components implemented using formal business rules. These programs are generally limited to analyzing one set of rules at a time. As a result these programs have limited usefulness when they are applied to business processes implemented using a BPMS, because a system implemented using a BPMS will typically contain multiple sets of rules, and these rule sets will often involve complex interactions.
A need therefore exists for systems and methods that allow for processing and reconciling multiple interrelated rule sets and business processes. Additionally, a need exists for systems and methods that allow business analysts and professionals to express the policies, tasks, rules and objectives in a format that allows interoperability with existing business procedures and automated systems without cumbersome coding requirements.